Conference: The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity

Time: Thu Mar 26, 2015, 7:30PM -
9:30PM

Location: Notre Dame Conference Center (McKenna Hall)

The Bible, Narrative, and Modernity joins an already rich interdisciplinary project at Notre Dame that seeks to reimagine the relationship between Religion and Literature. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this symposium seeks to challenge the common characterization of this period as increasingly secular. This view claims that a combination of archaeological and geological research, Darwinian biology, and German biblical criticism created a crisis of faith. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this crisis transformed European, and especially British, societies into something more middle-class, nationalist, aesthetically realist, and secular. Literary scholars of these periods have embraced and repeated the same narrative. By examining the Bible as narrative and the role it plays in shaping eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, this symposium challenges this common narrative of secularization, while exploring a range of religion and literature methodologies in the scholarship of these two periods.